Offering a rich ethnographic account, this book traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the European Union, a region where thousands of African immigrants have come in search of a better life. It draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Granada and Senegal, exploring the shifting, complementary and yet antagonistic relations between Spaniards and African immigrants in the Andalusian agrarian work place. The author's findings challenge the assumption of fixed national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries vis-à-vis outside migration in core countries, showing how legal and cultural identities of Andalusians are constructed together with that of immigrants.

Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field with its own academic standing. Contemporary bordering processes and practices are examined through the borderscapes lens to uncover important connections between borders as a ’challenge' to national (and EU) policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re-)framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The authors offer a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of the border not as an entity to be taken for granted, but as a place of investigation and as a resource in terms of the construction of novel (geo)political imaginations, social and spatial imaginaries and cultural images. In so doing, they suggest that rethinking borders means deconstructing the interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level by Western territorialist modernity. The result is a book that proposes a wandering through a constellation of bordering policies, discourses, practices and images to open new possibilities for thinking, mapping, acting and living borders under contemporary globalization.

This book focuses on the recent political trajectories within the Baltic Sea Region from one of the success stories of regionalism in Europe to a potential area of military confrontation between Russia and NATO. The authors closely examine the following issues: new security challenges for the region stemming from Russia’s staunch anti-EU and anti-NATO polices, institutions and practices of multi-level governance in the region, and different cultural strategies that regional actors employ. The common threads of this innovative volume are issues of changing borders and boundaries in the region, and logics of inclusion and exclusion that shape its political contours. From diverse disciplinary and methodological positions the authors explain policies of specific Baltic Sea states, as well as structural matters that make them a region.

This book introduces a new approach to understanding security in the Mediterranean and explores current challenges at the European Union (EU) Mediterranean borders. It investigates the intertwined area at the South of the EU that we call the ‘Mediterranean Global South’ where common actions and strategies are required to face common security challenges. The book critically addresses the EU's capacity to manage its expanding borders and analyses the actors involved in providing security in the Mediterranean Global South. Specific attention is devoted to South to North migration, one of the most critical security issues of current times, deploying its effects well beyond states’ borders.

Focussing European borders: The book provides insight into a variety of changes in the nature of borders in Europe and its neighborhood from various disciplinary perspectives. Special attention is paid to the history and contemporary dynamics at Polish and German borders. Of particular interest are the creation of Euroregions, mutual perceptions of Poles and Germans at the border, EU Regional Policy, media debates on the extension of the Schengen area. Analysis of cross-border mobility between Abkhazia and Georgia or the impact of Israel's »Security Fence« to Palestine on society complement the focus on Europe with a wider view.

This edited collection formalises Critical Border Studies (CBS) as a distinctive approach within the interdisciplinary border studies literature. Although CBS represents a heterogeneous assemblage of thought, the hallmark of the approach is a basic dissatisfaction with the ‘Line in the Sand’ metaphor as an unexamined starting point for the study of borders. A headline feature of each contribution gathered here is a concerted effort to decentre the border. By ‘decentring’ we mean an effort to problematise the border not as taken-for-granted entity, but precisely as a site of investigation. On this view, the border is not something that straightforwardly presents itself in an unmediated way. It is never simply ‘present’, nor fully established, nor obviously accessible. Rather, it is manifold and in a constant state of becoming. Empirically, contributors examine the changing nature of the border in a range of cases, including: the Arctic Circle; German-Dutch borderlands; the India-Pakistan region; and the Mediterranean Sea. Theoretically, chapters draw on a range of critical thinkers in support of a new paradigm for border research. The volume will be of particular interest to border studies scholars in anthropology, human geography, international relations, and political science. Critical Border Studies was published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

Focusing on the Mediterranean, this book offers a theological hermeneutics from the perspective of the margin/border and a theological hermeneutics of the border. At the core is a case study of the Italian Protestant minority and its engagement with issues of migration. While much of current migration theology is built around the principle of sacralization of the migrant person or 'vertical' association between divinity (God or Jesus) and people on the move, this work offers a 'horizontal' perspective on humanization or recognition of the value of every human being, based on the principle of a shared humanity created in God’s image, and a sense of identification, first by people at the margins. This approach seeks to avoid essentializing migrantness and victimhood. Elaborations on the relation between identity and migration are often sustained by exclusionary logics that lead to repressive policies. The book proposes a contextual theological reflection on minority identity that is at its core inclusive. It offers a contribution to theology beyond confessional borders and is open to dialogue with other disciplines, particularly critical border studies.

EU internal security concerns such as migration, police and judicial cooperation are today part of EU foreign policy. This book shows how those concerns dominate the EU agenda towards Mediterranean countries. Adopting a rational-choice institutionalist approach, it explores EU policy and the strategic choices made after the 2011 Arab revolts.

Connecting critical issues of state sovereignty with empirical concerns, Borderscapes interrogates the limits of political space. The essays in this volume analyze everyday procedures, such as the classifying of migrants and refugees, security in European and American detention centers, and the DNA sampling of migrants in Thailand, showing the border as a moral construct rich with panic, danger, and patriotism. Conceptualizing such places as immigration detention camps and refugee camps as areas of political contestation, this work forcefully argues that borders and migration are, ultimately, inextricable from questions of justice and its limits. Contributors: Didier Bigo, Institut d’Études Politiques, Paris; Karin Dean; Elspeth Guild, U of Nijmegen; Emma Haddad; Alexander Horstmann, U of Münster; Alice M. Nah, National U of Singapore; Suvendrini Perera, Curtin U of Technology, Australia; James D. Sidaway, U of Plymouth, UK; Nevzat Soguk, U of Hawai‘i; Decha Tangseefa, Thammasat U, Bangkok; Mika Toyota, National U of Singapore. Prem Kumar Rajaram is assistant professor of sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Carl Grundy-Warr is senior lecturer of geography at the National University of Singapore.